Stacking Stones​A Creative Craft Blog

From the mind of Jason Kapcala comes an eclectic journal dedicated to the study of creative writing, rock music, tailgating, and other miscellany. The musings, meditations, contemplations, and ruminations expressed here are my own unless otherwise indicated. Please feel free to share your comments, thoughts, and opinions, but do so respectfully and intelligently.

Fiction's Enduring Value

It’s hard to sell people on reading when your best pitch is “there’s no good reason for you to read this book, other than that it may make you feel things that you have been trying hard to suppress.”

Vertical Divider

The meaning of fiction is, I believe, the grand and glorious leap we make, both as we speak and as we listen, from our own lives to those of others. The meaning of fiction is empathy, our ability to recognize ourselves in others, others in ourselves.

―John Gregory Brown

If asked, most people would probably guess that empathy is an ancient concept dating back to the Hebrews or the Greeks or the Romans, that it arose from religion or philosophy. However, the concept of empathy is little more than a century old, and the word “empathy” did not enter our lexicon until the early 20th century when it was used to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself onto a work of art.

That’s right, empathy originated with art. . . .

More specifically, empathy originated with efforts to understand why art moves us despite the fact that it is fictive.

Theodor Lipps, a German philosopher, radically hypothesized that the power of art’s impact didn’t reside in the work of art itself, but was rather synthesized by the viewer during the act of viewing—the act of looking becoming a creative process itself.(Sound familiar?) Lipps called this einfühlung (“feeling into”), which British psychologist Edward Titchener translated into English as “empathy” in 1909 (deriving it from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos”). This phenomena explained why people sometimes described the experience of “losing themselves” in a powerful work of art (e.g. the fictional dream).

To be empathetic, one must possess the ability to do exactly what the character Scout describes in To Kill a Mockingbird: put yourself in the shoes of another and imagine vividly their suffering.

For all our national affluence, there is plenty of suffering to go around.

​With the latest election cycle and the current state of our nation, it often feels like the only thing we can all agree on is the fact that there is an illness creeping through our society. Who we blame for this illness—which Other—depends on our political proclivities, but in reality the responsibility for our current situation does not fall on any one group of people. It is systemic, and we are all implicated by it. Whether due to greed or apathy or fear or just mere desire for convenience, we have, bit by bit, grown inured to a culture where deep thought, sustained concentration, meaningful engagement with our inner selves, and wrestling with our own moral failures has become something we willfully avoid. We have created and accepted a culture where it’s easier and less painful to shutter ourselves off from authentic thought and feeling, and anything else that might require us to sit quietly with our suffering.

We live in the greatest, freest country in the world, and instead of taking advantage of that freedom through healthy discourse, we sate ourselves by passively consuming spectacle and melodrama and empty platitudes (not only in our entertainment but in our most revered institutions). In fact, we are so adamant about avoiding any meaningful engagement with sorrow (and, maybe, with joy, as well) that we have appropriated language in our fight against feeling: “snowflake,” “deplorables,” “politically correct,” “intellectual elitist,” “fake news,” “alternative facts.”​

As a culture, we are great at emoting, but we have forgotten how to empathize.

​It’s no wonder that fewer people choose to sit still with a book—not to mention the kind of book that that forces you into the hard and vulnerable work of dreaming up a character, caring about that character, imagining that character’s struggle, and identifying with that struggle in a way that is personal and deeply felt—especially when doing so offers no material gain. It’s hard to sell people on reading when your best pitch is “there’s no good reason for you to read this book, other than that it may make you feel things that you have been trying hard to suppress.”

But that’s the kicker. Suppression is not elimination. We’re feeling these things anyway.

On an individual level, most of us do not walk around feeling bored, needy, defeated, cut off from friends and family, inured against corruption, mired in depression, and generally sorry for ourselves, all the time. (Though some people do.) Humans are resilient. We have lives to live. And most of us function remarkably well in those lives. Within our sphere, at any given moment, we care about others, we perform charitable acts, we stand up for what's right. We love. But a great many of us are also lonely, confused as hell about who we are and where we fit in this great big world, frozen by the question of where even to begin. And there are even more of us who are so busy getting by that we don’t even recognize that we feel this way.

​If I sound pessimistic or unsympathetic, I don’t mean to.

​My father, even up to his death, called life “a great gift.” I think it’s why he struggled as hard as he did to hold onto it for as long as he could. Were he alive today, I think he would agree that being human is the hardest task that any of us faces during our lifetime. It’s painful sometimes. The free will and self-awareness that enables us to think abstractly and reflectively, to accomplish and appreciate great things, also comes with the burden of knowledge: that we have moral responsibilities we don’t always live up to; that the world can often feel unfair and arbitrary; that our mortal bodies will all eventually break down, become diseased, and one day die. That’s a lot for anyone to contend with.​It’s also what makes us all equal. That, and the fact that we have stories.​

Stories connect us. They make us feel. They create an alternate state of being. Avid readers understand that. We seek out this immersive experience. Some of it has to do with escape—we get to leave the familiar behind and immerse ourselves in a more interesting, more exciting world. But more often a literate reader’s desire stems from the fact that, when you leave a place, you often see it and understand it better in the rearview mirror.

The world of fiction is not our world. Not exactly. But it’s similar enough that it can act as a mirror onto our world. And though, it doesn’t teach us lessons about our world, it does provide a highly concentrated venue for us to slow down and touch those emotions and feelings—empathy, chief among them—which are naturally and necessarily suppressed by our need to live our daily lives, to get by and get things done.

​When we read empathetically, we are more likely to engage empathetically with others outside of literature, as well. We internalize empathy. It becomes a part of who we are, morally and intellectually. The end result is that we feel more connected to others, less lonely.Arguably, realist fiction promotes this orientation of spirit better than any other genre because in fiction there is no “privileged reading,” no definitive authoritative reality to contend with. In fiction, a reader is not only invited to picture the scene as depicted by the writer but made complicit in the development of character motivation. Your Atticus Finch is different from my Atticus Finch. And there is no living, breathing real-life correlative to which either of us can turn for a final verdict. We have only our imaginations.

What strange bedfellows fiction and empathy make. I began this series by asking whether it was socially responsible to continue writing realist fiction in a time of political unrest like this. I’m not the only writer asking this question. The better question might be: in a time when our country is led by men who lack empathy, can we afford not to continue writing fiction? While I support the penning of more pointed protests against the injustices in our world, it’s worth remembering realist fiction’s enduring value, and it's worth supporting fiction's ongoing creation.

When I was an undergraduate student, the RA in my floor once scoffed, upon learning that I was studying fiction writing, said, "What are you going to do with that?" In graduate school, years later, after a reading, a rhetoric-and-composition scholar came up to me and made the off-hand snipe, "It's only fiction—it's not like you're studying something hard." Years later, at another reading, one of the people sitting near me, an lawyer, commented, "can you believe they get paid to study this?"

What those people failed to understand in the moment is that fiction is valuable because it doesn’t come with a set of instructions. It's valuable because, unlike other forms of writing, it's not trying to sell us something. Because it has the capacity to make us feel more than we felt previously. Because it doesn't attempt to tell us the truth. If nothing else, by telling stories that aren’t beholden to an established truth—stories that didn’t “happen a certain way”—fiction puts us in touch with the wondrous complexity of human life that we rarely see in the news or on television. A complexity we are increasingly told to ignore in order to advance the black-and-white, us-versus-them rhetoric of our time. In doing so, fiction encourages our empathy--wild, seditious, subversive empathy. And it reminds us, most of all, that we are human, that we are among humans, and that to be human among humans is our greatest charge.

Jason Kapcala

Jason Kapcala is the author of North to Lakeville (forthcoming on Urban Farmhouse Press). When he's not writing, he enjoys reading, cooking, rock and roll, driving his Dodge Challenger, and studying the craft of writing.